Practical antenna selection for WLAN AP

Antenna selection, a cost-effective way to enhance network performance, has been employed in a limited manner in wireless local area networks (WLANs) due to the lack of channel information at the transmitter. In this paper, a practical antenna selection system without using channel information is proposed. We first describe the practical issues of antenna selection system for infrastructure-based WLANs, and then, analyze its characteristics through an extensive measurement study. Based on that, we propose antenna selection algorithms of access point (AP) for both (1) unicast transmission and (2) multicast transmission and reception. The proposed algorithms are comparatively evaluated using prototype implementation in a commercial AP. It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithms achieve up to 34% throughput gain and 54% frame error rate reduction for unicast and multicast transmissions, respectively.